I am making my first build, and I have no plans to overclock anything. I don't need a super fancy motherboard with a crazy amount of different slots, and I just want to do pc gaming with games like Skyrim, Far Cry 4, Dying Light, and similar games. I have pretty much everything picked out and feel pretty knowledgeable on all the other parts, but I really don't know a whole lot about motherboards. I am getting an AMD Fx 8350 so I need an AM3+ socket, I know that. Otherwise, my case is going to be a deepcool tesseract SW Mid tower case. I plan on having two sticks of ram, at least for now. I see a lot of people recommending ASUS, and I also see some MSI that look to do the same function just for around $20 cheaper. Again, I don't want to overclock at all, and I am looking for one hopefully less than $90.
You really want a 990FX board for an 8350. It is gonna be hard to find one of those for that price. The Gigabyte GA-990FX UD3 is prob the cheapest I'd recommend but I personally would go with the M5A99FX Evo/Pro from Asus.
I would agree with DerKrieger, the M5A99FX Pro is one of the best boards for 990FX which is what you want, I think they can be had for about $120, maybe abit less not sure.
Because you could buy a Z97 board for the same price as a decent 990FX chipsetboard. An i5 will be slightly more expensive, But significantly better in some games, especialy in skyrim. or any other cpu bound games, like mmo´s and what not.
i would "personaly" not invest money on a 3 year old EOL AM3+ platform anymore for gaming. If you are looking for a new mobo + cpu, then by all means go with an i5 if you can afford.
Note: That i not wanne talk you into anything, but its just my "personal" opinnion as a FX8350 user. ☺